Microsoft Azure


Microsoft Azure, commonly referred to as Azure, is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service and supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.
Azure was announced in October 2008, started with codename "Project Red Dog", and released on February 1, 2010, as Windows Azure before being renamed to Microsoft Azure on March 25, 2014.

Services

Microsoft lists over 600 Azure services, of which some are covered below:

Computer services

The Microsoft Azure Service Bus allows applications running on Azure premises or off-premises devices to communicate with Azure. This helps to build scalable and reliable applications in a service-oriented architecture. The Azure service bus supports four different types of communication mechanisms:
A PaaS offering that can be used for encoding, content protection, streaming, or analytics.

CDN

A global content delivery network for audio, video, applications, images, and other static files. It can be used to cache static assets of websites geographically closer to users to increase performance. The network can be managed by a REST-based HTTP API.
Azure has 54 point of presence locations worldwide as of August 2018.

Developer

Through Azure Blockchain Workbench, Microsoft is providing the required infrastructure to set up a consortium network in multiple topologies using a variety of consensus mechanisms. Microsoft provides integration from these blockchain platforms to other Microsoft services to streamline the development of distributed applications. Microsoft supports many general-purpose blockchains including Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric and purpose-built blockchains like Corda.

Functions

Azure functions are used in serverless computing architectures where subscribers can execute code as an event driven Function-as-a-Service without managing the underlying server resources.

Internet of Things (IoT)

Azure is generally available in 54 regions around the world. Microsoft has announced an additional 12 regions to be opened soon. Microsoft is the first hyper-scale cloud provider that has committed to building facilities on the continent of Africa with two regions located in South Africa. An Azure geography contains multiple Azure Regions, such as for example “North Europe”, “West Europe”. Where a location represents the city or area of the Azure Region. Each Azure Region is paired with another region within the same geography; this makes them a regional pair. In this example, Amsterdam and Dublin are the locations which form the regional-pair.
Microsoft has some Gold partners available across the globe to sell its products. In August 2018, Toyota Tsusho began a partnership with Microsoft to create fish farming tools using the Microsoft Azure application suite for IoT technologies related to water management. Developed in part by researchers from Kindai University, the water pump mechanisms use artificial intelligence to count the number of fish on a conveyor belt, analyze the number of fish, and deduce the effectiveness of water flow from the data the fish provide. The specific computer programs used in the process fall under the Azure Machine Learning and the Azure IoT Hub platforms.

Design

Microsoft Azure uses a specialized operating system, called Microsoft Azure, to run its "fabric layer": A cluster hosted at Microsoft's data centers that manage computing and storage resources of the computers and provisions the resources to applications running on top of Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure has been described as a "cloud layer" on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Microsoft Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services.
Scaling and reliability are controlled by the Microsoft Azure Fabric Controller, which ensures the services and environment do not fail if one or more of the servers fails within the Microsoft data center, and which also provides the management of the user's Web application such as memory allocation and load balancing.
Azure provides an API built on REST, HTTP, and XML that allows a developer to interact with the services provided by Microsoft Azure. Microsoft also provides a client-side managed class library that encapsulates the functions of interacting with the services. It also integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio, Git, and Eclipse.
In addition to interacting with services via API, users can manage Azure services using the Web-based Azure Portal, which reached General Availability in December 2015. The portal allows users to browse active resources, modify settings, launch new resources, and view basic monitoring data from active virtual machines and services.

Deployment models

Microsoft Azure offers two deployment models for cloud resources: the "classic" deployment model and the Azure Resource Manager. In the classic model, each Azure resource was managed individually. The Azure Resource Manager, introduced in 2014, enables users to create groups of related services so that closely coupled resources can be deployed, managed, and monitored together.

Timeline

Microsoft has stated that, per the USA Patriot Act, the US government could have access to the data even if the hosted company is not American and the data resides outside the USA. However, Microsoft Azure is compliant with the E.U. Data Protection Directive. To manage privacy and security-related concerns, Microsoft has created a Microsoft Azure Trust Center, and Microsoft Azure has several of its services compliant with several compliance programs including and HIPAA. A full and current listing can be found on the Microsoft Azure Trust Center Compliance page. Of special note, Microsoft Azure has been granted JAB Provisional Authority to Operate from the U.S. government in accordance with guidelines spelled out under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, a U.S. government program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud services used by the federal government.

Significant outages

The following is a list of Microsoft Azure outages and service disruptions.
DateCauseNotes
2012-02-29Incorrect code for calculating leap day dates
2012-07-26Misconfigured network device
2013-02-22Expiry of an SSL certificateXbox Live, Xbox Music and Video also affected
2013-10-30Worldwide partial compute outage
2014-11-18Azure storage upgrade caused reduced capacity across several regionsXbox Live, Windows Store, MSN, Search, Visual Studio Online among others were affected.
2015-12-03Active Directory issues
2016-09-15Global DNS outage
2017-03-15Storage tier issues
2017-10-03Fire system glitch
2018-06-20Cooling system failureNorth Europe region experienced 11 hours of downtime
2018-09-04Cooling system failure due to inadequate surge protection Brought down numerous services in multiple regions for over 25 hours, with some services remaining affected until three days later
2019-05-02DNS Migration Issue

Certifications